Context Window 48
This edition covers ElevenLabs’ new managed AI audiobook production service, Tony Robbins’s and Ray Dalio’s AI advice apps and what they mean for brand-author publishers, Adobe Analytics data on AI-influenced holiday shopping, OpenAI and Anthropic’s separate training and search crawlers and the trade-off for publishers between blocking AI and being discoverable, the Authors Alliance on AI scraping of institutional repositories, an 800-million-weekly-user milestone for ChatGPT, the Reuters Institute’s generative AI and news report, an Econsultancy reality check on marketing AI skills, and Dan Shipper on the “smuggled intelligence” of human framing inside AI tools.
It’s been a heavy week with travel, an IPG Lunch and Learn update and interesting discussions at the BISG AI Working Group. But before publishing breaks for the weekend and packs for Frankfurt, some interesting AI developments across audio, author apps and retail… AI audio platform ElevenLabs has introduced a new managed production service combining AI voice reading and human editing and post-production. Audiobook production is one of the launch use cases, and pricing starts at $2 per minute. It’s an interesting middle ground: cheaper than human voice audio, arguably better than out-of-the-box AI voice but still not quite convincing, to my ear at least. I also wonder if offering a managed service around it is also a tacit acknowledgement that tweaking outputs for quality isn’t easy. A couple of weeks ago, I commented on a piece about AI use in education and speculated about which self-help author would be the first to create their own AI coaching app. Thanks to subscriber Nikki Howard from Gill Books for pointing out that Tony Robbins was way ahead of my speculation: for $99 a month you could have access to 24/7 advice from his chatbot. Similarly, this week, hedge fund manager and bestselling author Ray Dalio launched a beta version of an AI advice app using a voice interface. For publishers working with brand authors, there’s an interesting question of whether this kind of AI product becomes a core part of the format mix, or if it’s the equivalent of the iPad apps that were launched with great fanfare in the early 2010s, few of which survive. With the holiday season in sight, Adobe Analytics published new research on how shopper behaviour is being influenced by AI: 53% of respondents had used generative AI for research, 40% for product recommendations and 36% for finding deals. This growing usage explains why ChatGPT is integrating buy links into LLM outputs, and Google recently introduced a payment protocol for AI agents. For publishers, this introduces a trade-off between restricting AI crawlers from their websites to prevent training, and allowing them to encourage visibility of products in outputs. OpenAI and Anthropic use different crawlers for training and servicing user queries, so it’s possible to take a granular approach. But Google and others do not, and most publisher websites that I’ve reviewed take an all-or-nothing approach. Web content being scraped doesn’t just affect publishers and retailers, but also universities. For academic readers, the Authors Alliance has a good piece here looking at AI scraping of institutional repositories (which often contain versions of publisher content) and tensions between restricting AI training and Open Access publishing. Ultimately, across both domains, this will be a judgement call for publishers, but I’m reminded of Tim O’Reilly’s aphorism that obscurity is a greater threat than piracy. At OpenAI’s Dev Day, Sam Altman claimed that ChatGPT now has 800 million weekly active users—a staggering figure that, if accurate, would make it one of the largest digital platforms in the world. For context, Microsoft 365 has around 400 million paid seats. In less than two years, generative AI has gone from experiment to near-universal tool, a shift no other technology has achieved at such speed or scale. For a more independent take on usage statistics, there’s a great new report from the Reuters Institute at Oxford University: 90% brand awareness of leading AI tools, all-time AI use increasing from 40% to 61%, and weekly use of AI tools nearly doubling. For publishers, it’s striking that information seeking is the number one use case, ahead of content creation. There are some interesting points in a recent Econsultancy study on marketing and AI: in particular, 47% of marketers described their knowledge of generative AI as advanced or expert: only 4% then passed a test on their knowledge. Finally, Dan Shipper has an interesting essay here commenting on sharp progress in AI performance but putting it in the context of human intelligence. It’s a timely reminder that the good results that are possible with AI depend on enormous amounts of human framing—not least designing tasks, prompts, and evaluation criteria.
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